If you don’t want to read a massive few paragraphs then this petition is basically “the new school bus routes suck and we want them back to normal”

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In 2024, CDC sunshine coast (the company in charge of running the school buses across region) revised the service network of buses serving Maroochydore State High school. In other terms, all the routes got either modified, deleted or combined with other routes. This process is marketed to people to “improve efficiency”, but after catching the bus this year it’s clear that there is no benefit to any of the new changes, and no one’s journey is made any better.

For context, I used to catch the former 5711 bus, which efficiently served the neighbourhood  it drove through. Now, I am forced to catch newly created route 5601, which merges former routes 5711 and 5781 (of which was already notorious for overcrowding). Today I caught my new bus and I was shocked at how much of a mess it was. There were at least 80 people on the bus, meaning every single seat was taken with over 20 people standing in the walkway. The bus was so overloaded that it even struggled to accelerate!

This experience wasn’t exclusive to my route, as all my friends who use the school buses noticed a surge in patronage, and huge delays caused by it. If you don’t believe me then the maths explains it all; there used to be 11 buses that served MSHS last year, now there are 8. Three bus loads of people may not seem like much but it causes routes already at risk of overcrowding to become a nightmare to use.

This issue affects the hundreds of students that use the service, as well as the parents of said children that now have to worry about them getting home later, on a poorly run taxpayer funded service.

This may all seem doom and gloom but it is very simple to fix this all. I suggest to revert all the changes made this year back to normal, or at the very least run more buses to supplement the demand.  

If we get enough people to sign this petition, then the lives of hundreds of students will be benefited.